This page shows how to remove sync.search.spotxchange.com from Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.

Does this sound familiar? You see sync.search.spotxchange.com in your browser’s status bar while browsing web sites that normally don’t load any content from third party domains. Perhaps the sync.search.spotxchange.com domain show up when performing a search at the Google.com search engine?

Here’s how the sync.search.spotxchange.com status bar message looked like when I got it on my machine:

As you can see, the status bar message appeared while I did a search at Google.

The following are some of the status bar messages you may see in your browser’s statusbar:

• Waiting for sync.search.spotxchange.com…
• Transferring data from sync.search.spotxchange.com…
• Looking up sync.search.spotxchange.com…
• Read sync.search.spotxchange.com
• Connected to sync.search.spotxchange.com…

If you also see this on your system, you probably have some potentially unwanted program installed on your system that makes the sync.search.spotxchange.com domain appear in your browser. Don’t send angry emails to the website you were browsing, they are probably not responsible for the sync.search.spotxchange.com status bar messages. The potentially unwanted program on your system is. I’ll try help you to remove the sync.search.spotxchange.com status bar messages in this blog post.

If you have been reading this blog already know this, but if you are new: Not long ago I dedicated some of my lab machines and wilfully installed a few potentially unwanted programs on them. I have been monitoring the actions on these computers to see what kinds of advertisements, if any, that are displayed. I’m also looking on other interesting things such as if the potentially unwanted program updates itself, or if it downloads and installs additional software on the systems. I first observed sync.search.spotxchange.com in Mozilla Firefox’s status bar on one of these lab computers.

sync.search.spotxchange.com resolves to 69.20.31.45 and spotxchange.com to the 198.54.12.112 IP address.

So, how do you remove sync.search.spotxchange.com from your browser? On the machine where sync.search.spotxchange.com showed up in the status bar I had SalePlus, YouTubeAdBlocke and IStart 5.3.7 installed. I removed them with FreeFixer and that stopped the browser from loading data from sync.search.spotxchange.com.

The problem with this type of status bar message is that it can be caused by many variants of potentially unwanted programs, not just the potentially unwanted program that’s installed on my computer. This makes it impossible to say exactly what you need to remove to stop the status bar messages.

So, what can be done? To remove sync.search.spotxchange.com you need to check your computer for potentially unwanted programs and uninstall them. Here’s my suggested removal procedure:

The first thing I would do to remove sync.search.spotxchange.com is to examine the programs installed on the machine, by opening the “Uninstall programs” dialog. You can find this dialog from the Windows Control Panel. If you are using one of the more recent versions of Windows you can just type in “uninstall” in the Control Panel’s search field to find that dialog:

Click on the “Uninstall a program” link and the Uninstall programs dialog will open up:

Do you see something strange-looking in there or something that you don’t remember installing? Tip: Sort on the “Installed On” column to see if something was installed about the same time as you started seeing the sync.search.spotxchange.com status bar messages.

Then you can examine you browser add-ons. Potentially unwanted programs often appear under the add-ons dialog in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or Opera. Is there anything that looks suspicious? Something that you don’t remember installing?

I think you will be able to track down and remove the potentially unwanted program with the steps outlined above, but in case that did not work you can try the FreeFixer removal tool to identify and remove the potentially unwanted program. FreeFixer is a freeware tool that I started develop many years ago. It’s a tool designed to manually find and uninstall unwanted software. When you’ve tracked down the unwanted files you can simply tick a checkbox and click on the Fix button to remove the unwanted file.

FreeFixer’s removal feature is not crippled like many other removal tools out there. It won’t require you to pay a fee just when you are about to remove the unwanted files.

And if you’re having difficulties figuring out if a file is safe or potentially unwanted in FreeFixer’s scan result, click on the More Info link for the file. That will open up your browser with a page which contains more details about the file. On that web page, check out the VirusTotal report which can be very useful:

Did this blog post help you to remove sync.search.spotxchange.com? Please let me know or how I can improve this blog post.

Thank you!